Archive | November, 2010

Ahead of the impending 30 November deadline for Europe’s Reach regulation I have lined up interviews with the European Chemicals Agency’s executive director, Geert Dancet, plus industry trade body Cefic’s Reach expert Erwin Annys. Europe’s chemical industry has been rushing towards this deadline because failure to comply will mean producers or exporters are doing business […]

The annual Chemical Industries Association (CIA) dinner took place in London last night with a much more optimistic atmosphere than for the last couple of years. Many of us trade journalists were guest either of the CIA or chemical producers themselves. With the 30 November deadline approaching, Europe’s chemical legislation Reach was a hot topic. […]

We at ICIS felt a bit of the heat generated from an antagonistic shareholder/owner relationship this week. An e-mail arrived from Romania’s Oltchim complaining about our coverage of statements made by Germany’s Petro Carbo Chem, which holds a 12% stake in Oltchim. The company complained about our coverage (also reported on this blog), of PCC’s […]

ICIS has just published an update to its global map of major ethylene projects. The map shows the continued dominance of the Middle East and China in the next wave of new cracker expansions. The two countries will add 17.7m tonnes/year out of a total global increase of 30.5m tonnes/year. Combined they represent 58% of […]

As predicted in last week’s blog post, Germany’s Petro Carbo Chem (PCC) has restated its interest in buying out the state’s remaining 54.79% stake in Romania’s Oltchim. PCC currently holds a 12.16% stake in Oltchim and now an activist shareholder has restated its interest in examining a bid for the financially-troubled company following pressure from […]

To ease the chronic shortage of crude oil in China, trial operations began on 1 November at the recently completed 1,030km-long Sino-Russian crude pipeline, Chinese state-run media Xinhua News Agency said on Tuesday. Crude was injected into the pipeline from the Russian section on Monday afternoon and is scheduled to arrive in China today. China […]